by Bruce Page
The offending Independent. Basic timing of the paper’s launch is in Michael Crozier, The Making of the Independent. The motivation in some of its best staff an urge to escape from government subservience at The Times is visible in ‘Rat Pack’, by Anthony Bevins and Colin Hughes (unpublished MS, Queen Mary College, London). The remarkable career of Tony Bevins is described in several obituary notices: Jonathan Fenby, Observer, 25 March 2001; Colin Hughes, Guardian and Andrew Marr, Independent, both 26 March. The basic concept of the paper is well explained in Whittam Smith’s fifteenth-anniversary article (Independent, 9 October 2001).
Here is Mr Murdoch. Horsman, Sky High. The remarkable sequence of events in the changeover from IBA to ITC was recalled by David Glencross (interview 10 February 2002), who worked for both organisations. The ‘impartial’quality of Sky News, he confirms, was less noticeable than the very small scale of its operation.
Debt crisis. John D’Arcy, formerly CEO of the Melbourne Herald group, was on the News Corporation board between 1987 and 1990, when Murdoch dismissed him without giving specific reasons. D’Arcy (interview 18 January 1999) said in several board meetings that Murdoch’s acquisition programme of the late 1980s was financially unsustainable – which of course proved correct. The manoeuvres which enabled Murdoch to escape the consequences are brilliantly set out in Chenoweth, Virtual Murdoch.
Ex-journalist. Neil Chenoweth interview, Sydney, 25 January 1999.
Fox’s corporate pelt, etc. David Honig was the fiercely determined Washingtonbased volunteer lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People who ignited the FCC inquiry into Fox Ownership. Murdoch’s jubilation at the outcome was matched by Honig’s disgust at what he saw as a process ‘tainted … Murdoch’s Republican cohorts blackmailed the FCC by threatening its existence’. See Ken Auletta, The Highwaymen.
Present necessities. Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 18.
Digital television. The Independent Review Panel recommended that:
the BBC should retain a central role in the provision of public service broadcasting in the early years of the digital age, at least up to Charter Review in 2006 … and should receive additional funding for the purpose. The preferred method was by an additional licence fee for digital television users … amounting to an average of £1.57 a month over the seven years to 2006, and falling to 99p a month at the end of the period.
This was bitterly attacked by Murdoch and other commercial broadcasters as a ‘poll tax’ which would inhibit the development of digital television (though detailed econometric evidence in the Panel’s report demonstrated that the reverse case was probable). Civil servants at the Department of Media, Culture and Sport made it plain in off-the-record conversations that 10 Downing Street refused to consider the digital licence fee, though additional funds (somewhat less than the Panel recommendation) were provided by other means.
Mercenaries. They are only useful, says Machiavelli, when there is no danger to hand. He insists on the point repeatedly in The Art of War and in The Prince, e.g. chapter 13: ‘The wise prince … has always avoided these arms and turned to his own; and has been willing rather to lose with them than to conquer with others, not deeming that a real victory which is gained with the arms of others.’
Kiss and kick. Kipling Journal, December 2002.
Lazarsfeld and his team first published in 1944, providing the basis of the ‘twostep flow of communication’ theory, in which ‘opinion leaders’ first receive, then disseminate (and modify), data produced by news media. The American Voter developed the argument further in the 1960s. Present-day investigations like The Emerging Democratic Majority (by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira), Why Americans Don’t Vote (by Ruy Teixeira) and Wealth and Democracy (by Kevin Phillips) don’t replace the model, but consider its potential success (or failure) under conditions of rising inequality and fast social change – where face-to-face communication remains essential to the formation of political and other opinions.
Robert M. Worcester, chairman of Market and Opinion Research International (MORI), in a private conference 21–22 June 1995 described public opinion as working through a ‘diffusion process’, subject to Lazarsfeld’s crucial demonstration that ‘opinion leaders’ exist in all social categories, ‘distinguishing themselves primarily by a higher consumption of media, and exerting an active influence on the opinions of people in their social surroundings’. Much work in the 1990s reflected a desire in advertising and marketing to discover just how much gender and age and education affect the influence of opinion leaders in consumer issues (such as cars and health) as much as in public affairs. Today, ‘however it is to be measured, we have a model of voter behaviour that is dependent upon a complex system of influences, local and national, direct and indirect, affecting the individual personally, affecting family/friends, and sometimes not touching his/her life directiy …’. Pippa Norris, Virtuous Circle, provides an up-to-date picture of the interaction between news media and politics.
Machiavelli’s argument. The Discourses, chapter 58:
in the matter of prudence and stability, I say, that a people is more prudent, more stable, and of sounder judgement than a Prince. Not without good reason is the voice of the populace likened to that of God, for public opinion is remarkably accurate in its prognostications, so much so that it seems as if the populace by some hidden faculty discerned the evil and the good that was to befall it…
In present-day polling it is found that the general public forecasts the election outcomes with great accuracy. Patten on Murdoch. Interview, 11 September 2001.
Nazi media. Roger Manvell in Thomas Parrish (ed.), The Simon and Schuster Encyclopedia of World War II (in part):
On October 4, 1933, a decree was issued which made every editor an ‘official’, forbidden to publish anything deemed injurious to the state or to act or write independendy; the editor became a censor and all journalists had to hold a license to practice their profession. Conferences were constantly called to give editors ‘guidance’. By 1939, Max Amann (secretary of Goebbels’ press office) employed 600 editors in chief; by 1944, 82 per cent of the German press had come directly under Amann’s control.
Berlusconi’s media control. Tobias Jones, The Dark Heart of Italy:
In Italy there’s no fourth estate: newspapers, with a few exceptions, are divided among the oligarchies … Besides owningjuventus the Agnelli group owns onequarter of all national or provincial papers (and, more importantly, controls 13% of all advertising revenue in the country). Berlusconi, besides AC Milan, owns the Mondadori publishing house, and therefore the copyright on a quarter of all Italian books. Il Giornale, a national newspaper, is his (or, technically, his brother’s) … as are three out of seven national TV channels. By now the most convincing explanation, albeit the most mundane, for Berlusconi’s political appeal is the simple fact that he controls three television channels. Having a politician who controls three television channels turns any election into the equivalent of a football match in which one team kicks off with a three-goal advantage.
Berlusconi’s Mediaset, says Jones, is not so much biassed as ‘a-political’. He adds a postscript: ‘The riddle of television ownership is still unsolved. Rather than sell his own channels, Berlusconi has suggested the sell-off of RAI, effectively its privatisation. By now, every news programme on every channel will run two or three long, admiring items on Il Presidente. No critical voice can be heard.’
Extinction of diversity. Royal Commission on the Press 1961–62.
Mozart. MacKenzie interviewed for The Real Rupert Murdoch, Channel 4 (1998).
Popular trust. A survey for Lord Nolan’s Committee on Standards in Public Life asked people to say which professions could be trusted to tell the truth. Its 1995 report was bad news for politicians and journalists (figures are percentages): clergymen/priests, 80; doctors, 84; teachers, 84; television news readers, 72; professors, 70; judges, 68; the police, 63; ordinary people in the street, 64; pollsters, 52; civil s
ervants, 37; business leaders, 32; trade union officials, 32; politicians generally, 14; journalists, 10; government ministers, 11. Surveys carried out since have seen ups and downs, but no real movement at the bottom. In 2002 doctors had moved up to 91 per cent; journalists were at 13 per cent, below politicians (19 per cent). Government ministers, who usually rank below politicians generally, were for once effectively level at 20 per cent. Rather less frequently, institutional trust is surveyed, and this produces different results. For instance, NOP asked at roughly the same time as Nolan:
Q. Do the following have a good influence on life in Britain today, a bad influence, or no influence on life in Britain today?
Source : NOP for Sunday Times, 30 November and 1 December 1995.
Again, ups and downs occur, but the BBC and the broadsheet newspapers are fairly clearly among the best trusted of national institutions. And even Parliament did a lot better than the tabloids, comprehensively loathed.
Attlee and the media. Williams, Dangerous Estate.
Lincoln of course spoke before the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) sought to stop individual states limiting the right to vote. As Judith N. Shklar points out (American Citizenship) it did very little for Southern blacks ‘and … it did nothing at all for women’. Even the Voting Rights Act 1965 leaves room for improvement if compared to Australia or some European examples.
Participant rulers. Google finds many thousands of Web references to Milton’s 1644 essay against censorship. If the First Amendment marks Areopagitica’s establishment in democratic law, then it was 147 years taking effect. (The Areopagus hill north-west of the Acropolis was a traditional meetingplace supposedly democratised by Pericles.) Milton opens with his own translation of words from The Suppliant Women rendered today as ‘Liberty speaks in these words: “Who with good counsel for the city wishes to address this gathering?” Anyone who wishes to do this gains distinction; whoever does not keeps silent. Where could a city enjoy greater equality than this?’
The plot concerns a debate over going to war to help the women of the losing side in the Theban civil war to get their dead buried – an apparently selfless gesture. (Milton, a stout republican, omits that Euripides’ Athens is a constitutional monarchy, and his quote is from Theseus, the king.) In ‘Three Laws of Politics’ R. G. Collingwood describes Machiavelli as setting the moment in which:
political science recognised what I will call the positive function of the ruled in the life of a body politic. To be a mere recipient of a ruler’s behests, an obedient subject, is to have a merely negative function; to have a positive function is to have a will of your own which your ruler must take into account. The chief lesson which Machiavelli learned from his famous study of the fortunes of Louis XII on his Italian campaign, and set forth in the third chapter of The Prince: ‘Concerning Mixed Principalities’, concerns the way in which a prince may use his subjects as a reservoir of strength; they thus become no longer negative or passive partners in the work of government but active participants in it.
Puritan England to America. Shklar in American Citizenship:
the ideas presented at the state constitutional conventions [of the early nineteenth century] which were called to deal with the demands for political democratization were far older than the American republic. Like so much else in American political thought, these had their origins in Puritan England, and especially in the Putney Debates of 1647 … ‘We judge,’ one of the officers said, ‘that all inhabitants that have not lost their birthright should have an equal voice in elections.’Moreover, they ‘ [did] think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under.’
Shklar points to the unique stress produced by the juxtaposition of constitutional liberty with modern slavery J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment:Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition is a famous, subtle account of the republic’s confrontation with corruption.
Hamilton and mass society. See Chapter 7 above.
Chinese bureaucracy. An impression still exists that pre-communist China was run by an extensive mandarinate. Professor John King Fairbank of Harvard insisted with great pertinacity that the opposite was true, and virtually all scholars seem now to accept this – though how so few ruled so many remains somewhat unclear.
John to Abigail Adams. America Past and Present Online.
Toxicity. Weber never fancies that modern life is possible without bureaucracy but fears ‘the disenchantment of the world’ through its insistence on secrecy and irresponsible control. Mommsen, Political and Social Theory of Max Weber, quotes his belief that ‘together with the inanimate machine it is busy fabricating the cage of serfdom which men will perhaps be forced to inhabit some day, as powerless as the fellahs of ancient Egypt’. And H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills translated a still darker passage from Weber’s Economy and Society:
Bureaucratic administration always tends to be an administration on ‘secret sessions’: in so far as it can, it hides its knowledge and action from criticism … The concept of the ‘official secret’ is the specific invention of bureaucracy, and nothing is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy as this attitude, which cannot be substantially justified beyond these specifically qualified areas. In facing a parliament, the bureaucracy, out of a sure power instinct, fights every attempt of the parliament to gain knowledge by means of its own experts or from interest groups…
Jefferson dined alone. The John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston has an exhibit concerning the dinner which took place on 29 April 1962.
Like a moron. Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets.
Cold war debacles. Moynihan is not so naive as to suggest in Secrecy that an exact measure can be made. But he points out that by the time communism collapsed the US budget was so badly ravaged by expenditure aimed at a wildly overestimated threat that assistance like that given to the defeated of 1945 could not be contemplated.
BSE. House of Commons, 26 October 2000. The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Nick Brown) endorsed the Phillips inquiry in its statement that those who misled the public over BSE acted ‘in accordance with what they conceived to be the proper performance of their duties’. This was repeated many times by government spokespeople.
Lying bastards. John Rentoul, Independent, 16 November 2002, reviewing The Political Animal by Jeremy Paxman.
Errors. Milton, Areopagitica, last paragraph.
Expansion of secrecy. Summarised by Richard Gid Powers in his introduction to Moynihan, Secrecy.
Sales pitch. David Yelland interviewed by the Financial Times, 15 October 2002. Euroschemes. These and many others are collated at www.cec.org.uk/press/myths/r.
Serious impact. The Observer ran three IGM constituency polls during the 1997 election. Two Tory MPs (Allan Stewart and Piers Merchant) who had been the subject of tabloid sex-scandal stories were found to have support at least as strong as any candidates of their party. But in the previously safe Tory seat of Tatton there was massive hostility to Neil Hamilton – exposed in the Guardian as taking money to ask questions for the boss of Harrods. Hamilton lost the seat on a huge swing to Martin Bell.
‘By the hand’. Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 18, ‘Concerning the Way in Which Princes Should Keep Faith’.
Indictments and calumnies. Machiavelli, Discourses, chapters 7 and 8.
Media bill and media ownership. Professor Barwise in Financial Times, 15
October 2002. Extended in discussion.
15: STATESMAN – AND MEDIA SAVIOUR 16: A DROWNED CHILD Unanimity. Unanimity. See ‘Their Master’s Voice’, Guardian 17 February 2003. Greenslade noted that Newscorp at this time was publishing about 40 million newspaper copies per week. He had just been reported in his own Sydney Daily Telegraph as saying: ‘We can’t back down now, where you hand over the whole of the Middle East to Saddam.’ Murdoch heaped lavish praise on George W. Bush and on Tony Blair while outdoing their war aims. They strongly de
nied that war on Iraq had anything to do with oil, but Murdoch had no such inhibition. ‘The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy … would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country’
Suez and Vietnam. Literature on Suez is very extensive, but scarcely any of it now challenges the fact that the British, French and Israeli governments in 1956 conspired to manufacture a pretext for invading Egypt and seizing the Suez Canal. The best single brief account remains that of Anthony Nutting, who quit the Conservative government rather than take part (No End of a Lesson, 1967). The Tonkin Gulf incidents of 1964 are less clear-cut in that some naval action did occur on 2 August, but the US government had no serious evidence of another on 4 August. Nevertheless the second was elaborately manipulated and turned into the legal basis for a massively destructive war. To be sure democratic war-making is never immaculate, but these incidents, and Iraq, are more akin to totalitarian behaviour, such as the Polish ‘attack’on Germany which the Nazis fabricated in 1939.
Blix and the Smoking Gun. A much calmer and more credible version of these events is given in Dr Blix’s Disarming Iraq. (Incidentally the slightly different use of ‘smoking gun’ as metaphor for Iraqi nuclear armament has been reported by Newsweek as the original inspiration of Michael Gerson, then a Bush speechwriter.)
Media scepticism wilted. Dr Brian Jones was interviewed by James Naughtie on Today (Radio 4) 29 July 2004 at 8.10 a.m. By this time all but fanatics had abandoned hope of finding WMD in Iraq, and Dr Jones revealed that Lord Butler, who criticised the removal of ‘caveats’ from the intelligence-gathering process, had complimented him for his efforts to prevent inclusion of the ‘45 minute’ missile claim.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrams, Mark and Rose, Richard, Must Labour Lose? Penguin, 1960. Adler, Michael W, ABC of AIDS (fifth edition). BMJ Books, 2001.